Y’know, another thing just occurred to me as the UPS guy just handed me my latest shipment of test strips: sometimes you start stockpiling them, like when your insurance changes, or they start to hassle you about payments, or any number of other idiotic things that US insurance companies tend to do. Thus, you may end up with way too many of something or other.
I know that my insurance is changing on Jan 1. Though I’ve spent hours on the phone with the new insurance, they give me absolutely no assurance about whether or not they’re going to cover the stuff I use on a regular basis. I’ve heard so many horror stories that I’m fully expecting a fight, and thus, I’m getting as much as I can on my existing insurance so that I’m not stuck without <critical item X> because my new insurance has decided that I’m not worthy of it until I put up a fight.
So yeah, at some point in the future, I may end up with a surplus of strips, or pump supplies, or whatever. I hate throwing stuff like that out, but the alternative - going without while my insurance is being an asshole - is a health risk, and I’m absolutely not going to do that.
As it stands, I have 3 boxes of pump supplies that come to something like $750/box if purchased on the open market that I will probably end up throwing away because they changed the pump and the old stuff is no longer compatible with it. I knew the change was coming, but they couldn’t tell me when, and the supplier happily billed my insurance for the old supplies and sent them to me “just in case.” A week later, I got the new stuff. They all come from the same place. You’re telling me they didn’t know when they were going to ship the new stuff when it came a WEEK later? :dubious:
This is why people end up with supplies to sell (not that I’m going to - my stuff is prescription-only) and our health insurance system is so bad.
Just to note, another source of supply is women who had gestational diabetes, after they’ve given birth. With both of our children, my wife ended up with a stash of extra diabetes gear, including a nearly full box of test strips that she’d had to open up less than a week before our first was born. She didn’t try to sell them, but because the box had been opened we couldn’t get any charity to take them, either. I believe they ended up getting reluctantly thrown away.
As robert_columbia says, could you be more specific about that “fraud”? Do the tests strips belong to Medicare, or do they belong to your mother? If I buy my friend a book and give it to her, it’s hers, right? She can keep it, sell it, give it away or throw it in the trash, and none of those uses are fraud.
So who do these test strips belong to? Did your mother sign something with Medicare that she promises any supplies they pay for are for her personal use and she swears never to sell them to anyone else? She may have, I don’t know. But it seems like there has to be a specific thing she’s violating, an agreement knowingly not kept, if we’re going to call it “fraud”.
My (lay person’s) understanding is that insurance pays for supplies for your own use. That’s part of the whole deal. If you’re getting stuff, paid for by insurance, and then selling them on to someone else, the insurance company is suddenly providing you with cash money rather than the medical supplies. As I understand it, that’s fraud. I’m sure a lawyer could explain it better.
People who sell their food stamps are also committing fraud. The agreement is with the government and I am certain that when you sign up and accept them you are told not to transfer ownership or face a penalty. Why would anyone think otherwise?.
Because I’ve had both food stamps (well, a LINK card) and health insurance, and the food stamps paperwork made a huge hairy deal of pointing out repeatedly in urgently sized fonts that I was never ever to dream of selling my food stamps to anyone else. Big scary signs at the DHS office warned me against it. Insurance? Not so much. Yes, maybe it’s there, in small print somewhere in my policy handbook that I’ve never read. And of course, if it is, I’ll totally agree that to agree to such and to sell the extra test supplies would be, if not fraud, at least breaking some sort of contract law.
But I don’t know that it is. I’m asking how you do. If you do because you’ve read it, that’s cool, just hit me up with a link. Or even just say, “because unlike some irresponsible posters, I’ve read my entire insurance agreement and they clearly say that the things that they pay for under the policy that I own aren’t mine.” I can dig it. But it seems there isn’t actual knowledge of that here, but merely assumptions.
I’m not sure how I can prove a negative without us both poring through pages and pages of Medcare guidelines, and that’s too much like my workday, so I’m not gonna. But I did read this article, which covers a lot of the reasons why the black market on diabetic supplies is a bad idea, but never actually says it’s illegal or fraudulent for people to transfer ownership of their test strips because Medicare paid for them. It is, in fact, illegal only because anyone selling test strips needs to have registered with the FDA to do so, and people selling their extras to a person or website offering to buy them rarely have registered. But they’re also small fish, and so it’s a safe sort of crime, more or less. The people buying one and two boxes are turning around and selling hundreds and thousands of boxes. Those people are getting busted.
Medicare’s probably a red herring, though. While they’re generous with their test strip coverage, tracking meters have shown that Medicare patients are really all that off with their strip counts. And, “An investigation two years ago using random database checks of Medicaid patients compared their diabetes diagnosis with test strip buying patterns. It failed to unearth any patterns of fraud or abuse.”
Wow, can’t believe that someone would even question if selling something obtained thru a government program for the poor would be illegal to resale buthere you go. Bottom line is it’s not illegal to sale and resale test strips, but it is illegal to resale one obtained thru the medicare program; problem is they can’t tell where they come from without going after the little guy and there too many of them to investigate.
Hell the government has even prosecuted people for reselling cheese that was given away free, you think that they would forget to make it illegal to sell government obtained medical supplies? This is America, we love to persecute and prosecute.
Everybody eventually dies, not just us diabetics. :eek:
And to further elaborate, The government is unpopular enough without hauling in sick people to court over an individually minor amount of product; they like to go after the big guys. Problem is the big guys can claim that they had no idea where the stuff was coming from so they are essentially untouchable. I think I’m going to start asking mom if I can “borrow” some of her test strips to keep at my place just in case she needs them.
I see an assertion in the first article like the one I already made, that it’s illegal to resell without registering with the FDA. The second article doesn’t mention a thing about test strips, but is about fraudulent claims in Durable Medical Equipment (DME) and home health care - agencies certifying medical need where none exists and thus defrauding Medicare by selling people wheelchairs and other DME that they don’t need (two areas I sadly know too much about, being in that exact industry.)
Again, I’m not saying it’s cool; I’m saying no one has yet supported the claim that it’s fraud to sell excess supplies appropriately ordered and delivered to the now deceased patient who was on Medicare. This is GQ, not MPSIMS.
Although technically the resale of test strips isn’t illegal, according to the Food and Drug Administration, it is against the law to resell supplies obtained through Medicare or Medicaid.
When you talk about deceased people you are dealing with an estate, don’t believe that you could prosecute the estate for disposing of the property. Unless of course the property was moonshine or a meth lab.
Yes it is but again they rarely if ever prosecute people for it. You are basically selling your benefit, not the actual card; both of which are illegal. I’m not even going to bother to cite this one because there is so much BS being posted about food stamp fraud these days that it’s impossible to get an unbiased cite. The government isn’t going to waste it’s time prosecuting poor people who do this because the jails are already overcrowded. Much easier to go after the people who directly buy the cards in mass.
